Efforts to resolve the war with Russia are in jeopardy after US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky engaged in an unusual yelling fight in the Oval Office on Friday. An enraged Trump told Zelensky, “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out,” as a meeting intended to defuse tensions over the abrupt US outreach to Russia instead heightened them.
Millions of people’s lives are on the line with you. “What you’re doing is extremely disrespectful to this country, and you’re gambling with World War Three,” Trump continued. Zelensky was in the White House to negotiate a peace agreement with Russia and sign a contract to share Ukraine’s mineral wealth, even though the US president recently branded his Ukrainian. The meeting followed a week-long diplomatic dance in which the British and French presidents visited the White House to urge Trump to stay in Kyiv.
However, Vice President JD Vance’s statement that “diplomacy” was required to end the war caused tensions to rise. Vance accused him of being “disrespectful” in the president’s office when Zelensky questioned “what kind of diplomacy” he was displaying. Then, when tensions grew as the leaders debated whether the US had done enough to halt Putin following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Trump supported his vice president.
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